


pigtails

by DragonNinjaAri



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-11
Updated: 2012-04-11
Packaged: 2017-11-03 10:49:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/380564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DragonNinjaAri/pseuds/DragonNinjaAri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For one instant, Jo considers cutting it all off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pigtails

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to an anonymous prompt: "after no exit and before born under a bad sign, Jo gets in trouble in a hunt because of her hair."

If there's one thing that Jo's come to understand the most since setting off to hunt, it's that too many of those stupid horror movie cliches that she'd laughed off when she was younger have more of a basis in reality than should be allowed.

She's out in the woods past midnight, having just left a cabin in the woods, just running for the corpse buried out under a big oak tree in the backyard. It's not the time, not the cabin, not the woods that worries her. She grew past being scarred of all of that back when her daddy finally told her stories about vampires and ghosts and werewolves and things that lurk waiting to eat the souls of children. No, what has her in a bind is the old low-hanging tree branches that her hair's twirled around, like old, bony fingers gripping at her scalp.

She's half a mind to think the ghost she's hunting has something to do with this. Can ghosts possess trees? Well, she's sure they can now.

In a fit of panic, she wonders if she should just hack it all off; it's probably going to get in her way a lot more in the coming days. Do any hunters have long hair? Probably not. They probably all cut it short. Shaking fingers curl over the handle of her father's knife. Jo Harvelle wants to be a good hunter. She  _is_  a good hunter.

Except.

Except she remembers.

She remembers her daddy, good with his hands, even when they're covered in scratches, knuckles skinned and scabbing. She remembers those mornings after a hunt when he'd sit her down at the bar and she'd sit so still, not even bouncing like she usually did, so excitable and full of energy that hunters called her a little fireball, a little engine, a little hunter already. (Mama sent them out of the bar after that one.)

So gentle and careful, Bill Harvelle brushed her hair so slow she could feel every bristle on her head. He brushed it until not a single knot remained and it flowed smooth like silk. Then, with those slow, gentle hands that cut off the heads of vampires and burned bones and cut into werewolves with silver, braided her hair into two little pigtails.

She'd run around the rest of the day, deliberately making them bob and bounce and hit her face when she twirled. No one did braids like her daddy. Mom tried, bless her, but she couldn't quite get it just right-- tight enough so they didn't puff out in the hot, sticky summer air, but loose enough so they'd move with her instead of against her. She loved her pigtails, wore them so long.

Wore them until the day her mama sat her down and told her in a choked voice that her daddy was a hero, that her daddy loved her, never forget that, that her daddy wasn't going to come home this time--

Jo cried for days. Jo stayed home and Jo curled up with blond tangles surrounding her and not even caring. Then she heard it one day, her mama crying down the hall, and she found her with a picture of her daddy, curled up and trying-- trying so hard-- to be strong.

Jo walked in with her little brush and, silent as she had been since the news that her daddy was dead, pulled on Ellen's shirt. She handed her mama the brush and they sat quietly as she brushed out the knots, the tangles, the grief, the pain, the tears.

Mom didn't do braids very well.

Mom did pigtails, though. She did those fine.

Jo never wore pigtails again. Not once. But she always made sure to get all the knots out of her hair every night, too. She never let it get like that again.

Here she stands, struggling against the branch, her daddy's knife in her hand, and an impulse curbed. Here she stands, and there's the old ghost, the one she sees out of the corner of her eye, approaching with a bloody throat.

Jo really hates ghosts.

Calloused fingers tighten around the handle, and in a rush she stabs forward, the tree tugging at her roots so hard that for a moment she's afraid it'll rip everything out. But then the ghost screams and fades, and the branches relax and let her go. She lets out a breath as her hair falls loose and free around her shoulders, and she's at the oak in a minute, jabbing at the ground until the eyeless corpse stares her in the face.

The job's easy from there. She knows how to salt and burn a corpse. It's the first thing she learned, after don't cry, don't scream, and sometimes a little lying and a stolen cement truck can get you a long way.

Let it be known that this night is the closest she comes to calling her mom. Her fingers linger over the speed dial for so long that she almost gives in. At the last second, she drops her phone to the motel bed and, wordlessly, withdraws her brush and pulls the knots from her hair, gentle and slow until it's smooth like silk, like the side a polished knife, like bones preserved and untouched by time.

That night, she sleeps with her hair in pigtails.


End file.
